Protobi

Post Editor

← All help posts

View post

<img src="/uploads/upload/image/5200/direct/1571166605444-1571166605444.png" alt="Small icon showing a list of names including Giorgia Lupi, Mike Bostock, Tufte, Bret Victor, and others - representing thought leaders in data visualization mentioned in concatenated text format." style="width: 36px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">

Survey data sometimes has multiple answers combined into single strings with a delimiter. For instance, the [Data Visualization Survey by Elijah Meeks](https://medium.com/@Elijah_Meeks/2017-data-visualization-survey-results-40688830b9f2) asks respondents who they consider to be a thought leader.

## Example

This was elicited as a multiple response section. But, the data shows the multiple responses catenated with a semicolon:

<img src="/uploads/upload/image/5200/direct/1561566726095-split-pre.png" alt="Protobi data view showing a question "Who do you look to as a thought leader in data visualization?" with concatenated responses. Each row displays multiple names separated by semicolons with uniform 0.4% percentages, including combinations like "Mike Bostock;Tufte;Bret Victor" and "Nathan Yau;Hadley Wickham". A Filter box and Apply button appear at the top." style="width: 360px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">

We might wish to see how often each person is mentioned overall, regardless of who else they might be mentioned with.

## Split at delimiter

Press the blue edit icon for the element and select "More properties...". Then add a comma next to the "split" field.

<img src="/uploads%2Fupload%2Fimage%2F5200%2Fdirect%2F1608296791521-1608296791521.png" alt="Element properties dialog box for a Country element showing various configuration fields. The "split" field is highlighted in blue and contains a semicolon (;) character, which will be used as the delimiter to split concatenated text responses into separate values." class="fr-fic fr-dib">

The data is now separated by the delimiter and becomes a multiple-response element. Now we can see how often each person is mentioned individually:

<img src="/uploads/upload/image/5200/direct/1561566887401-split-post.png" alt="Protobi data view after splitting showing individual thought leaders with their mention frequencies. Mike Bostock leads at 26.7%, followed by Tufte at 17.3%, and Alberto Cairo at 15.8%. Blue horizontal bars visualize the percentages, with Filter and Apply controls at the top." style="width: 360px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">

Publishing

Date

Status

Slug edit

Content

Thumbnail

Categories Manage

Tools

AI Database

Danger zone